And [say:] "Limitless is God
in His Glory; and I am not of those who ascribe divinity to aught
beside Him!"

(Muhammad Asad Translation)

The challenge of the secular
consensus of the West to Islam is firstly expressed in the very
foundations of human understanding. What can we know? What does
it make sense to accept as true? The secular consensus is that
religion is essentially something we cannot know, something we
cannot accept as true.

The challenges can be stated
essentially as:

Religion makes claims about
reality which science has shown are factually wrong.

&

Faith is irrational.

Knowledge in the Western mind is
considered to be discovered from only two sources: observation
and reasoning analysis. All other sources are considered invalid
and ignored. This, coupled with the above statements on the
status of religion, amounts to a complete dismissal of any
religious understanding of existence.

Claims to religious knowledge are
tolerated only if they seem to depend on the dubious and hence
invalid source of spiritual experiences. In this way
the non-religious person can disregard such claims as nonsense
and evade any guilt for rejecting the claims of each and every
religion.

My approach in response to this is
to show that the challenges set out above are factually wrong:
Islamic faith is rational. Scientific fact and
true Islam have never contradicted each other. Moreover, I
intend to demonstrate that belief in Islam makes much more sense
than disbelief.

However, to do this we need to
examine what are the sources of knowledge: Can religion fit into
a framework based solely on the two defined valid sources of
knowledge commonly accepted or must we move to a new (actually
older1) system of thought defined by the
claims of Islam and including the processes of observation and
analysis?